Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.
And AOC said, stop playing nice.
There has to be a political price to pay for Elon Musk's takeover of the government. We have such a great show for you today. Historian Thomas Zimmer stops by to parse the inner workings of Trump and his Project twenty twenty five agenda. Then we'll talk to Harvard's Theta Scotch Pole about the history of the right and how we got here.
But first the news.
Somali so much, so much going on. Trump instituted these tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and then some quote unquote concessions were made that kind of aren't really concessions. What are you seeing here?
So Trump was sort of almost about to get into a trade war with Mexico and Canada. He put he said it was going to tear off goods from them, five percent tariff on all goods from Mexico and Canada. Big excitement, would mean totally dismantling the North American Free Trade Agreement, which again he had sort of redone in
his last administration. But Mexico and Canada called him on the phone and asked him not to and then promise they'd do things that they were already doing, like spending more money on the border, which they were already doing, and stopping the flow of fen at all, which they were already doing. And Donald Trump decided not to teariff them, though he is still doing a ten percent tariff on goods from China, and that I think is still going,
which will actually make things more expensive as well. I think that Trump knew, you know, on Monday, when he said he was going to do the tariffs, the doubt just sort of toppled and was down a lot. It was down in pre trading, and he realized that tariffs were going to really hurt the markets. And you'll remember that Donald Trump still does love the equity markets.
He wants the dow to go up.
That's basically the one thing that is sort of the check on this presidency. So once he made this deal, but you know, it is the same deal the New Republic. Noted, Mexico sent fifteen thousand troops the border in twenty nineteen and sent ten thousand again in twenty twenty one. So shine Baum basically agreed to do what she's just been doing. But Trump is going to sell that as a victory to his people, and as long as he feels he can sell it to a victory, then he's happy with it.
Yeah.
I think it is a funny way to deal with the toddlers, just say oh, yeah, sure, I'll do this thing that I've already been doing already.
Well, that's what everybody's doing, and again, like that's what the people, the CEO of Facebook is doing, That's what all of these companies are doing. But it is also partially they are obeying, right, I mean they're obeying or they're making it look like they're obeying.
So what is like playing.
Along with him and what is enabled autocracy? I think it's going to be a delicate dance there.
Yeah, So, speaking of obeying, the FBI has turned over details of five thousand employees who worked on the January sixth case to Trump's Justice Department, and that's scary.
You know.
Look, Trump wants to purge the FBI of everyone who's worked on a January sixth case.
That's like a lot of the FBI.
And I think that it's worth I think we talked about this last time. But like, there are a lot of people in the FBI who are white Republican men who may have worked on a January sixth case.
But being nice, right all.
And you know it's a it's an agency head by Republicans, staffed by Republicans, and now Trump is going to take some of them out because they wandered into his case. So the Deputy Attorney General Emil Bouvet in a Friday memo he with a subject that said terminations. He's given FBI officials to a noon deadline to submit the details
of who has worked on the January sixth investigations. It's worth pointing out here that almost immediately the FBI filed a lawsuit to prevent this, and so you know there's a lot by the way, there's so much legal action happening here, Like FBI is suing, a lot of these federal employees are suing. There's just going to be a ton of legal action. And rightly, so, look, Trump is trying to break the law. The question is will he listen to what the courts tell him.
All you law students graduate were worried about your jobs, just head to DC right now. I promise. The foods as bad as everyone told you, but you got a job at least, so after I'm done making light of things. One of the things the rich span on Earth likes to do is late night agreeing with really, really questionably bad tweets. And we have one here.
So Elon is up at night posting about white South Africans. And I don't even think we need to go into detail here except to point out that this guy white South Africans. He's retweeting something white South Africans persecuted for their race in their home country. You know, with Elon, it's never about what's really happening. It's about lots of other crazy stuff. And clearly he is not happy about South Africa. I mean, I would unpack this, but it's so unseemly I don't even want to. I think you
guys get the idea. He's late, late at night, he's tweeting, and it does seem like he is perhaps not the hero that we need right now. That's the understandment of the year. Actually, that's the worst thing I've ever said. Let's just say he's engaging in some late night racist tweets.
We use the term fever dreams sometimes for when people are saying something crazy, I'm thinking ketamine dreams here, ketamine dreams.
The point is, none of this is like sober, grown up behavior. And he's running the federal government now, so it's pretty bad.
Ye, not great.
He says he's shutting down USAID, and the Lever News has an interesting story on why he might want to do that.
Musk is targeting this agency that is inspecting his company's Starlink equipment, right, and I want to point out that in September, the agency's inspector general and worth remembering that Trump has fired all the inspector generals. Remember that, so you can see why Trump is not a fan of
inspector generals. Right, They're meant to root out corruption. He told Congress that USAID's oversight of the Starlink satellite terminals proved the Ukrainian government that USAID's efforts to protect against sexual exploitation and abuse in Ukraine, and so USAID web pages mentioning SpaceX and Starlink seemed to have disappeared from
the agency's website. I mean, USAID is this like large government aid organization that goes into a lot of countries that need help and sort of exercises this American soft power, and you know, it's perhaps possible that Elon has run a foul with them. Remember there was all sorts of stuff with Starlink where he you know, he was accused of turning it off at times when he wasn't supposed to. And again we don't know if those accusations lead to anything.
But not great.
And then so this is a pretty interesting thing. I would also add that there's just a little bit more here. The other thing about USAID that I think is funny is that and I saw this on Twitter, and I thought it was really funny. Was you know, I come from a lefty family, so I just always assumed and I bet you thought this too, Jesse, that Usaid was just like where the did stuff.
I knew that there was a little more time, but.
I thought, ever for Cia.
I figured this was like some real like Gladio coup d'etas stuff that we like, just fun and stuff, or we shut people up with some aid that we don't want to rebel exactly.
It's so funny.
It's like we're in yet another moment where we just the Republicans making us like things that we always thought were a little bit sketch. Thomas Zimmer is a historian at George Washington University and the author of the substack Democracy Americana, Welcome Back, Too Fast Politics, George Shown Professor, friend of the pod, very smart academic, Thomas Zimmer, thank.
You so much for having me. I honestly hope that one of these days we will get to talk about some pleasant things rather than a rapidly escalating constitutional crisis.
Yes, yes, well let's talk about that. What's going on?
I mean, that's a good question, is it. I mean, look, we are in the midst of a completely unconstitutional takeover of central government institutions, resources functions. It's unfolding at at dramatic pace. It's all based entirely on the regime's assertion of absolute power and impunity. It's pretty I mean, even for people who were probably expecting this to be very
different from twenty seventeen, more comprehensive, more aggressive. I believe both you and me were in that camp, right, We were both expecting this is not going to be like twenty seventeen. It's not just going to be a rerun.
This is going to be worse but to me, the speed and the aggressiveness with which this is unfolding is still absolutely remarkable, and so yeah, to me, the best way of thinking about this is, honestly, we're not looking at maybe this is going to lead to a constitutional crisis. We are in the midst of this. This is a full on assault on constitutional government. This is in many ways,
this is a coup. I mean, we have right now we have a private citizen who has absolutely zero constitutional authority is occupying government agencies and departments and it's installing his I don't even know what to call these people, tech engineer goons who apparently are like young men in their late teens or early twenties with zero relevant experience installing these people across the government. This is outrageous. It's absolutely outrageous, and it is very dangerous.
Yeah.
One of the things that I think has made everything move a lot faster is Doge because remember when we started talking about Project twenty twenty five, Doge didn't exist and Elon Musk was not on the scene. So they had a plan to dismantle the federal government down to the studs, which is happening right now.
But the Doge part of it, the.
Elon on going in there and sort of dismantling things have hazardly like getting into the payment system.
That stuff is pretty new, right.
Yes, And I will also say this isn't just an extension of Project twenty twenty five, right, So I think it's really important to see a big part of what is happening, and a big part of what makes this different than twenty seventeen is Project twenty twenty five. All the planning that went into this, all the executive orders that were drafted and ready this time and we're not in twenty seventeen. That's a big part of it, right. So I'm not saying this isn't they're not enacting Project
twenty twenty five. But I think there's also on top of that this sort of the tech right, the Silicon Valley tech barons, kind of embodied by your musk, they're also seizing on this, and they are also doing kind of their own thing, and to some extent this alliance
with the vision of Project twenty twenty five. You said, you know, Project twenty twenty fift is about dismantling certain parts of the government, we should say, right, not all of it, because they also want to use other parts of the government, weaponize it, mobilize it to sort of impose a certain vision of society onto America. And so mask is basically I think the assault on the constitutional order is coming from different angles all at the same time.
If you think about, like, what are the different factions that make up the Trump is right, there's different factions, right, they're not all the same. There is the Project twenty twenty five crew that's basically Heritage Foundation, reactionary leads, Christian Nationalists does sort of camp. There is also sort of the the Maga America first nativist scene that's like think Stephen Miller, right, these kinds of people. There's a lot of overlap between those two, but they're not the same, right,
It's different factions. Then there is also sort of the feudal tech lords like Elon Musk, Right, that's a different faction. Again, they are aligning in a lot of ways, but they're not all the same. And then there's like the Trump factor, if you will, And I think what's happening right now. A big question going into the Trump administration this time was how are these different factions and they're not always
eye to eye. We saw this just a few weeks ago when remember when Musk and Bannon had like a shouting match and it was all about work visas, yes or no? Right, is that a good thing or a bad thing? And like the MAGA nativists were like, we want to get rid of these work visas. We don't want to bring these these brown people in. And then like the masks of tech right, They're like, no, we need those because we want the cheap labor to come in, right.
And so there is friction between these different factions. So big question was how would they interact and like who would get to do what they want to do and who would have to take a step back. And I think what we're seeing right now is no one is taking a step back, and they're all just going all in. This is a feeding frenzy. Like all of these different MAGA factions have just been given the green light to go ham on the constitutional order and they're all going
all in all at the same time. And I think that is a lot of the dynamic that you're seeing and of this complete escalation is because this is not just Project twenty twenty five. It is also the feudal tech lords and the mogernativists. They're all going all in all at the same time, and it's basically because they've been given the green light to just just go do whatever you want. I don't think this is a sustainable
model of governance. At some point they will have to sort of deal with the wreckage that they're creating here, But for now, it is creating an enormous of destructive energy, and I think that is what we're kind of seeing here.
Right.
There's going to be enormous unintended consequences and some intended consequences. But you can say what you will about all of these conservative think tanks, the Heritage Foundation, these people, they all have different peccadillos, different wants, different goals, but these are goals that they've had for a long time, right.
I Mean, what I think is the most interesting when you read through Project twenty twenty five is it's like a wish list of things they've been trying to do forever, right, Like taking back the Patama Canal that was a conservative talking point from post Carter, right, like that none of this stuff is new, and a lot of it has been so they've been trying to do forever whereas Elon was a Democrat, right, So what he is trying to.
Do is sort of a new idea.
Now that said tech bros have wanted to end mainstream media since they came on the scene, So that okay, I mean in some ways it is like we're seeing like the sort of typical Silicon Valley tropes intersecting with the typical far right tropes.
Right, yeah, I think so. And I think the perception of someone like Elo Musk and this whole st of VC Silicon Valley tech class as kind of liberal ish or libertarian ish that was always I think a misunderstanding. I think it was a kind of mistaking technical progress for progressive right. And it's kind of mistaking the fact that these people are not Someone like Musk is not
socially conservative. He's not a religious conservative, right, and he liked being close to power, and that included in like say the nineties and early two thousands and Obama era, that includes some democratic power. But you know, the second, the second the government and whoever is in charge of the government was sort of slightly more serious about actually
imposing any kind of regulation on these people. They're like, no, wait a minute, that's actually not what we signed up for, right, Because I think someone like Musk has always been entirely convinced, right, entirely convinced that any kind of restriction for him is illegitimate, because he truly believes, I mean, the guy is completely delusional. He truly believes that the very interest of humanity itself aligns entirely with his personal ambition. Right, That's how these
guys look at the world. Hey, we are the sort of creative, disruptive geniuses who will take humanity into the better future. How dare you come up with, Like, I don't know, any kind of regulation, any kind of HR requirements, any kind of like. And I think that's also why they're so angry at their own HR departments, Right, That's what's going on here, Like they're looking at their own
HR departments. And as someone says, hey, Musk, listen, here's the thing, Right, we cannot hire entirely like white boys age nineteen to twenty three who all look the same. We're going to have to do something about this, right, And he thinks that's outrageous. He thinks that's absolutely outrageous. This is sort of the grievance underlying all of this, they really think, and this is why you have this kind of pipeline from tech libertarian ish to far right
fascist right. There's kind of this. This is sort of the peed Teal trajectory, this Elon Musk trajectory. So I think it's a misunderstanding to ever think there was these guys were liberals or they were sort of on board with a liberal democratic order. They were not. They were fine with sort of hanging out with Obama as long as Obama was sort of inviting him to the White House.
That's soundst deferential.
Yes, that's exactly right, that's exactly right. But they are completely convinced all the regulations need to go.
Right, which will be not great.
A lot of what's happening here is that people are telling Elon that there are things that are bad, and then he's attacking them. So USA it is a really good example, right, This is huge federal agency that does aid for countries that we have destroyed in earlier wars.
I mean, really like.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but like they're in Vietnam, they're in you know, they're in Africa. There are places that have been decimated by America in previous wars, not just those countries, but there's certainly a fair amount of that. And they do things like, you know, help democracy, which again is like a bad word in trump Land, but for obvious reasons, right, because it runs
contrary to what they want to do. But being rich does not give you the constitutional authority to take away federal agencies in the name of tax cuts.
So explain to me what you think is going on here.
I think they've just announced that they will shut down quick which shut down USAID, which I mean, this is a federal agency that was created in the early nineteen sixties by an Act of Congress. Neither Musk nor Trump himself has the authority to just abolish this or shut this down. This is not how it's supposed to work. Again, this is utterly and entirely unconstitutional. Right, there's no absolutely no constitutional for it. Again, not just Musk. Also, Trump
cannot do this. This was established by an Act of Congress I think in nineteen sixty one. And yes, I mean, you're absolutely right. This is kind of a on the right, there's this idea that USAAD specifically is kind of a hotbed of like far leftist extremism, that this is a way for leftists who remember, they truly believe are kind of in charge of all these government institutions, agencies, that this is sort of the way the left the conquerte left.
And it has nothing to do with a real existing left, but the left.
Right, it's antifa, it's a van to say.
Sometimes they call it socialism, communism, Marxism is all the same. They truly believe there is this vast conspiracy across the American government and that these conspiratorial, radical leftist forces have taken over all these institutions and now they're using them to spread their dangerous ideas, and in the case of USAD, they're spreading them across the world. Right, So this is Bunkers, right, But they truly believe USAD is spreading like dangerous Marxist
transgenderism whatever across the planet. And I mean, it's completely bonkers. And so now again this is why I'm saying we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis because this is so fundamentally unconstitutional.
But what we're careening towards is that just like with the spending free is the OMB memo that was last week's drama, right, was the OMB memo where they froze all federal spending, something that again the Empowerment Act prevents. The post Nixonian Anti Corruption Empowerment Act of nineteen seventy four is meant to prevent. There was a stay on that, so they're not allowed to do it, though who knows
if they're doing it. Now we have another situation where undoubtedly a court is going to come in and tell them they can't do it. See, I feel like we're hurtling towards a constitutional crisis. But what happens when a court says no, you can't do that, and they say fuck you, which is where this is going.
So first of all, yes, that's absolutely where it's going. I think when they announced they would end Berfright citizenship also via executive order, also once again completely unconstitutional. The president cannot just rewrite the Constitution via an executive order. I think the playbook there was clearly more in line
with what they did with. If people remember the travel ban or so called Muslim ban of twenty seventeen that was also first stopped by the courts, given back to the administration, they kind of changed around the wording whatever it went back to the courts, courts stopped at a second time, went back to Trump or you know, the Trump administration, they changed it around again, and the third
time around the courts let it pass. Right. So, within like six months or so this going back and forth a little bit, they had theirs of travel ban, and I was thinking, this is probably what they're going for. They're going with sort of a maximalist kind of initial he is our executive order. Court's going to stop it. We're going back back and forth a little bit. Will not get everything we want, but we'll get a version of this. Right. This is I think with many of
the executive orders, how it's going to go. Now, where I'm not entirely sure what's going to happen is what are we doing about the fact that I mean, Musk is literally occupying these federal agencies and departments. I mean he's literally installed these people in the Treasury and there. I'm not entirely sure. This is not like an executive order where a court can say, hey, we're going to
stop this, right, here's your injunction stop it. Something else will have to happen, something physical will have to happen. Right with the fact that Elon Musk is now in charge of the federal government's centralized financial and information system, because that is a fact. I see this as different than the O and b A memo where they said, hey, funding freeze, and then you know, but that's in and of itself not a fact. Yet, that's sort of an
order right to the federal government. And then the courts come in and say this order isn't valid. But there's now a physical reality in which Elon Musk and his goons have occupied these nerve centers of the federal government, and something physical will have to happen there like they have, they will have to be removed. Right. I think it's
an immensely dangerous situation because it's unprecedented, completely unprecedented. And I also think it'd be great if we had an opposition party that would know how to handle this in some productive way rather than just say, Congress will have to investigate. What do you mean investigate? There is evidently, very clearly in front of our eyes some very clearly
unconstitutional legal stuff happening. Right. You can't just say Congress will have to investigate, you have something more will have to happen here well.
And then the other thing is if we want to talk about.
This is like FBI, right, so Trump is a war with the FBI. But a lot of these FBI agents are trumpy people, right, Oh yeah, yeah, like white Republican. It's been now led by Republicans forever and ever and ever.
Oh absolutely, And.
A lot of these FBI agents were actually slow walking their investigations of January six because they felt perhaps politically, they had political feelings that, you know, they didn't think it was so bad to support their guy. Those guys are now going to at least theoretically possibly be fired.
Yeah, I mean, that's what they're trying to do, right, They're attempting this was all I mean, by the way, this is all the past seventy two hours, so this was all coming down Friday. You know, they're attempting to purge the FBI by basically trying to fire or forts to resign everyone even remotely involved in January sixth prosecutions, which I mean that was one of the biggest things the FBI ever had to do. So this is potentially
thousands of agents and higher officials. I've seen numbers fig The New York Times had numbers going all the way up to like six thousand agents. That would be like forty percent of the FBI personnel. It's crazy, and you're absolutely right. I mean, this is if you fire six thousand FBI agents, you probably have fired at least four and a half thousand Trump voters. It's completely unclear where
this is supposed to go. I mean it's also I think very clearly if you think about this stuff in terms of state capacity and government capacity to actually do its job right, because I mean the federal government. And this is a lot of people are saying, oh, like, this is like what Musk did with Twitter. Okay, fair enough, but if Twitter breaks down, we don't have twitlter anymore. But if the federal government breaks down, I mean, this
is something completely different. Right, There's millions of people who depend in this country every day who depend on the federal government doing its job right. Like I no funding and whatever it may be, all these different functions. I just don't know where any of this is going. You're definitely right. We don't know yet. Nothing has reached the Supreme Court yet, right, so this is going to be
a big, big thing. A lot of this stuff, like right now, federal judges on the district level on the circuit level, they are saying, look, no, you can't do this, We're going to stop this. But that just means this stuff will make its way up to the Supreme Court, and then what happens.
Right, No, well, I mean I actually don't and I think that's a real question. I'm not sure the Supreme Court gives him the blind check he wants.
My expectation would be that John Roberts does not like this. Well, look, he's on board with the general vision right of sort of entrenching white Christian patriarchal dominance, but he doesn't want to look bad doing it right. In his mind, he wants to at least be able to uphold this idea of being an institutionalist and all this kind of stuff.
So my working assumption is also that the Supreme Court will stop the most outrageous kind of stuff, like, for instance, as of right now, I don't think they would green light them ending but afraid citizenship, they would probably say you can't do this, but then also probably let through and kind of you know, support a lot of the other stuff they're doing. Right, so they might stop I don't know, ten percent, twenty percent and let eighty percent through.
But I think overall that that still puts us squarely in the territory of regime change. This is not like what they're trying to do here is not an acting different policy. They are an acting regime change. They are completely fundamentally changing the rules of how power is being wielded in this system, who gets the wield power, who gets the control power. That is fundamentally changing as we speak.
And I think that will have lasting, lasting effects. Well that's the goal, right, absolutely, Yes, regime change, that's the goal.
Yes, Thank you, Thomas Zimmer, Thank you so much.
Theda scotch Pole is a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University and the author of russ Belt Union Blues. While working class voters are turning away from the Democratic Party, welcome back to fast politics, Theda.
Nice to be here, Amalie. If I can call you.
That, yes, please do. I'm so glad you're hearing you know.
I am not the only person who thinks of you as this, but you're just an incredibly brilliant academic who this is your area in a lot of ways. The last I interviewed you was this summer. We talked about twenty twenty five and the sort of roots of it. Now we are in the second Trump presidency, so give me as much as you can sort of how we got here.
We got here because of Trump, but we also got here because the Republican Party has been radicalizing from a buff and below for about twenty years. I don't think forever. I'm not one of these people who thinks this is forever. You know. Trump kind of synthesizes the desire of the super rich to destroy government's ability to tax them, regulate them,
and open up opportunity and security for most Americans. And at the same time, there's been a kind of movement in and around the Republican Party from below that's angry about immigration above all, but also the changes in gender and race relations. And Trump put all that together into one big ball of resentment and catering to the super rich. And what's new now is that for round two there are very carefully laid plans by a whole series of
elite groups around Donald Trump. He hasn't really changed. He wants to watch TV, he wants Axians, and he wants money for his family and friends. But the rest of them are much more prepared to sort of destroy the federal government. And of course it's all a link to a minority, but an intensely feeling minority of Republicans and maybe a majority of his supporters who want to bash immigrants.
And so we're getting that on TV. But meanwhile we're getting an attempt to destroy the federal government's capacities.
Yeah, there are really separate things here, right There is a group of very rich people who want to unravel the federal government, and that comes from a sort of Koch Brothers ethos, a libertarian sort of rage at the federal government.
It's the war on FDR and the Social Safety Net.
Talk to us more about sort of how this group Discovery sort of came together with the racist group, even though you know what I mean, the sort of the very you know I call.
The methno nationalists, the grassroots yeap. It's not been a single organization or a single conspiracy. I mean, I think for many years leading into Trump one, the Coke network where they organize multi billionaires around Charles and David was alive. Then their project to sort of gut the federal government,
destroy unions. But we've now got another iteration of that because once Trump got into power, you know, every rich person on the right and now increasingly across the board wants access to them because they want to be able to pay them off in return for regulatory breaks and tax cuts. They want access. And the latest round of this, of course, is Elon Musk and the other tech bros.
And they're kind of an iteration beyond the Coke network because they're the ultimate narcissistic business people who believe they should rule the world and who have the communication means to reach a lot of the alienated ethno nationalists who are just angry. They think America has changed in ways they can't control. They're fed a constant diet of lies. I don't see why as an academic I should not use the word that's correct.
I want to talk to you about another thing, because when there was this murderer of this healthcare ceo, you know, when Luigi Mangione murdered this healthcare executive, I would say people did not want to condemn it. There was a lot of people on the populist left and the populist right who did not want to condemn it.
This in my mind, and again I'm no.
Academic, struck me as a very bad sign, right, because murdering people is bad. Much of our social contract is predicated on the idea that murder is bad. Here is the celebration of a murder of someone who is a very rich person. Now on the other side, we have tech broke billionaires becoming celebrities trying to sell the American people on cutting what little assistance they get from the
federal government. Does this make you think we're about to hit a perfect storm, because that's what it makes me think.
Well, not sure what you mean by a perfect storm. I think we're in a very big crisis, and part of it is the breakdown of any kind of political capacity to build faith in and use effectively government. And you know that there have been problems with that, because when you're dealing with a niilist right that wants to destroy, it's easier to destroy than it is to sustain and use. But I also think we have to recognize the big
changes in culture communications. The way Americans think about themselves is a real unleashing of narcissistic anger and of demands that's facilitated by social media, facilitated by a communications system that rewards yelling and screaming and hatred. Really, it's all tilted, right, But there are people across the spectrum and engage in it. And I think a lot of the resentment of the United Healthcare CEOs. You know that people are saying they
resent assurance companies. Okay, well that's fine. You can't deal with that problem at all by killing an individual, right.
They have resentment towards the wealth amassed by a few. So here are these wealthy people trying to get more money from the federal government to pay for tax cuts, right, I mean that's what this is.
Well, yeah, sure, no, they want to basically want to raid the federal government. They do want people in the liberal states that tend to be net contributors of taxes. Where I come from in Massachusetts, we send a lot of money to the federal government and they want to keep that, but they want to hand it out to their friends, not to poor people in Mississippi or the Midwest. Now, I would not attribute to most Americans resentment of great wealth.
I would call it ambivalence about great wealth. This is a country where people want to get rich. We haven't changed. And so part of Trump's formula has always been to say I'm so rich. I can stand with you. I mean, that's the formula for plutocratic populism anyway, but it has a real side to it. And I think this must thing, I think this must thing is going to cost him. I don't. I think people are increasingly and by people, I don't mean the hardcore maga, I mean the majority
that would determine things are increasingly seeing through this. But it's still ambivalence.
You know, Musk's polling keeps going down for obvious reasons. I mean, one of the reasons why Trump has been so allergic to cutting government spending is because it's not very popular.
Can you talk about that, well, it definitely isn't. I mean that Americans don't want things from government. I mean, my first book about the nineteenth century was about that, about how civil war pensions were the most generous disability and old age pensions in the world at the time, at the same time that we were talking about ourselves as rugged individualists that don't need anything from government. I mean, Trump has definitely understood that. Basically his core constituencies, at
least the geographic areas they come from. Our net takers of all kinds. We're talking about social security, we're talking about Medicare, we're talking about veterans benefits, we're talking about disability payments, really disability payments, you name it. And that's why this episode last week, this last week has been
so interesting. They put out a metalw no doubt Trump and I Musk inspired that we're just going to freeze everything, and then they suddenly begin to realize, well, wait a minute, that means our people. So yeah, that's a big contradiction. I interpret what's going on right now as the Republican Party is trying to avoid having to vote on any of these things, and Trump doesn't want them to either. He just wants to do things by fat and then he will, like a beneficent king, he will reintroduce the
things that his people want. That's what he thinks.
Yeah, you know this as known nationalist crew.
Pretty well, are these the same people as the Tea Party movement?
Well, the Tea Party was the start of it in Many well or the accelerator of it, and any living Tea partiers now are over the top. MAGA. But there are more more. Young men have been recruited, of course, some women. It's never perfectly one way or another. The Christian Conservatives, many of them remain very loyal to Trump on no matter what, are willing to offer moral justifications for the most heinous things. So he's got a pretty
durable core. But you know, it's not a majority. That's why I think people need to calm down a little bit and recognize that the task of people who are horrified by this betrayal of what America stands for, because that's what it is, is really not popular with anything like a majority of citizens. And so the thing is to engage the disengaged and to give pope at heart and tactics to those who want to slow this juggernaut and begin to defeat it. In twenty twenty six, that's
the next opportunity. It may be the only opportunity.
Yeah, that is a really important point here, because we know that midterms are state elections, and once we get into federal elections, it's going to be a little bit different.
He stacked the DOJ with people who, unlike last time, will overturn elections, and now I don't think Trump's going to be running again. I think that's a red herring. You know, these Republicans who will have to vote for some things. They're trying to avoid it, but they're going to have to because the dead limit is coming out.
They are on the ballot, a lot of them, and so we should be holding their names, their feet to the fire and spending a little less time chasing every Trump rabbit down every rabbit hole.
I think that's a really important point.
What are the things that you feel like are the most important In my mind? I keep saying to myself, like protecting norms and institutions, like the sort of fundamentals of democracy, the free press. I mean, that's a teetering on the brink. But what are the in your mind, what are the sort of tent poles to keep us in the free and fair elections world.
Well, those things are important, but you can't talk to the majority of voters, including the more disengaged in those who are not college credentialed, about that stuff. That is not going to work. What you have to do instead is say, hey, wait a minute, he promised the lower prices. Are you paying less? What does it mean if our school, including in many rural communities, has to fire a lot
of teachers because we aren't getting grants anymore. What does it mean if the local hospital, and I would name it is going to have to close a wing, or is going to have to close down or is going to have to close drug rehab. These are things that are not just in urban America, but an exurban America where the Trump crowd are powerful because the aim is to pin the blame on a Congressman X who's voting for that stuff or who isn't standing up against it.
And boy, there's plenty to work with. There really is. And that's how the first resistance in twenty seventeen actually made headway. They talked about the Affordable Care Act and they saved it.
Yeah, I mean that's the thing.
It's like people are right now being like Democrats have no plan, and the reality is they couldn't have a plan until Trump started doing this stuff because there was a moment between the election and the inauguration where and this was his problem in the campaign. You couldn't make people understand that Trump was going to do this stuff because he hadn't the last time.
Yeah, we have to look back over America and in world history and realize that in the wake of major pandemics, there's a powerful desire to forget to just block that time out. This is not a partisan thing if you go back and look at the flu up in them at the end of World War One. It was written out of American politics and culture because people yearned to forget that which they were powerless to deal with. And terrible disease is one of those things. So are terrible fires.
And so Trump benefited from that because he was able to say, oh, it was better before, and a lot of people thought it was better before. And they also thought he didn't do the things that everybody said he was going to do. And you know, I think it's too much to ask people to understand write down to the details. Who he's got around them. Now they have
to see it. Unfortunately, I hope the scene isn't too late, because we have seen this in other countries where it starts out with an election and it ends up with no ability of the opposition to contest anymore.
That's really scary and also really true. I'm thinking about the De Cameron and like this plague literature stuff.
Was that true with the bubonic plague?
Well, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, and we had a faculty that met by zoom and read back all the way to the Babanic Pike. The scapegoating of ethnic groups, the desire to just forget it and resume. This is very strong in these kinds of terrible global disasters.
Oh interesting, So what was the ethnic group that was scapegoated after the Black Plague?
Just Jews of course, right.
And in nineteen eighteen it was like immigrants and Italians and Gypsies.
I'm not so sure, but Germans certainly. It happened during a war. There was a strong sense even during it. I mean President Wilson didn't even do anything. He kept holding parades, but spread it. Remember this was one that hit young adults, that killed zillions of young adults. There was no vaccine, so, I mean, you would think we
would be so much better off. But this desire when it's over for the survivors to say, we that's over, We'll just go back to normal, and then to forget who might be responsible for whatever happened during that's very strong.
Yeah, that's so interesting.
What sort of shook Americans out of that nineteen eighteen kind of.
Great depression and the New Deal? I mean, hopefully we don't have to wait. I mean, look, I don't think that's the core. That's an ingredient, and how Trump was able to sell himself to the less attentive as better than Biden. But those people will wake up soon. I
think they're already beginning to wake up. I think they're spreading disillusionment about the ties to Mosque and any kinds of cuts which they have to cut a lot of things that communities and people depend upon to pay the bill for what they want to hand to the trillionaire class. They just do. And so they will be doing these things.
And this is what you see in the Mosque versus Bannon fight, right.
Yeah, to some degree, Bannon is of course back on board because he thinks it's all working. But yeah, they disagree about immigration. But look, we haven't talked about that. I think immigration is theater. Notice that they aren't going into the states with the most undocumented immigrants, or where undocumented immigrants are crucial to the economy. They are construction workers in Texas and Florida, they are agricultural workers in
many Trump areas. They're going into cities, and they're bringing along the cameras. This is meant to divide, which it does, and to embarrass Democrats and Trump is watching it and they'll keep doing it, and it's incredibly cruel, but it is not really going to happen at anything like the scale they're talking about.
So so so interesting. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope you will come back.
Okay, well, keep at it.
We all have to.
They're no moment perfectly Jesse Cannon Molly.
One of the things I've always been told is Marco Rubio is a normal Republican. Oh no, little Marco, He's going to save us all with his sanity. Turns out one second as a Trump official and we have absolutely psychotic.
Behavior, absolutely psychotic behavior.
Rubio floats dark.
Plan to deport US citizens to third country. Okay, it's hard to parse who's the worst here. It seems to me like it's sort of disappointing that that Rubio has turned out. I mean, we always knew who was like this, but there's Rubio. Then there's all this craziness with RFK just came out of committee and he's probably going to get voted in TALSI. It's just a cavalcade of crazy.
I talked to a reporter friend of mine who said, might as well have them get in the people he would pick the other people would pick would also be crazy too. I don't know if that's true. We're seeing a lot of Republicans just debase themselves for Trump, which I guess is then why should today be any different
than any other day? Right? So, congratulations Republicans, you really you know what, if we ever get out of this Trump president, say, there will be no one left in the Republican Party who has not just completely debased and destroyed themselves for Trump. Yep, that's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense
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